With the third leg of the 2010/11 HSBC Sevens World Series less than a week away, England Sevens head coach Ben Ryan is calling for his side to maintain the level of performance that has seen them reach Cup finals in both of the two opening tournaments.

Despite a last minute 22-19 loss to New Zealand in South Africa in December, England's 29-21 victory over the reigning World Series champions Samoa in Dubai has seen them gain 44 Series' points, leaving them four ahead of Gordon Tietjens' New Zealand at the top of the standings.

"It’s a good place for us [first]," said Ryan.

"We have enjoyed coming back together and being in camp before New Zealand, but we are now in a position where we don’t want to drop off from. We have set our standard and want to maintain it.

"Teams get better at this stage, Samoa did it last year, and we are aware that only 25% of the Series has gone. If you have a bad pairing you can drop from first to fifth. Equally, if we have a good two legs we could be 30 points clear.

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"Fiji will definitely come back fighting. Having seen some of their footage they were very unlucky and if some of their big forwards come back they could be one to watch, especially as defending champions."

Nothing for granted

England begin the New Zealand Sevens as the number one seed and are joined in Pool A by Wales, USA and the Cook Islands and will be favourites to reach the Cup quarter finals this year.

But despite reaching the Cup semi finals last year and winning the tournament in 2009, Ryan will be taking nothing for granted, remembering what happened in 2008 when they failed to reach the last eight in the Cup.

Having lost all three of their pool matches, including defeats to two of this year's opponents Wales and the Cook Islands, Ryan is not looking past day one.

"Our pool doesn’t look easy. We have Wales in there and that is always going to be a tough match and the Cook Islands have beaten us here before in 2008.

"But they are all tricky games. We are not counting our chickens and we know we need to get similar results to maintain our levels."

England begin their campaign against USA in Pool A, at 14:28 local time on 4 February, and the excitement, as the tournament played at Wellington's Westpac Stadium draws closer, is apparent in Ryan's voice.

Unrivalled atmosphere in NZ

"New Zealand is a special place. We always enjoy going there and it is a leg where we have our preparation right, where we want it.

"The facilities are awesome and everything down to our liaison officers make it an enjoyable place to go. In my opinion the stadium and the atmosphere during the tournament is unrivalled on the circuit, and even though we don’t get a lot of support we enjoy every second of it."

Ryan has had to make one enforced change due to injury, with Nick Royle replacing one of England's star players from the opening two legs - Ollie Lindsay-Hague.

"Ollie was a play maker. He was really good in Dubai and then he got injured. But what Nick brings is a finisher in the classical sense, he knows his way to the try line.

"He scored 19 tries in his debut season for us last year and he has been playing at Fylde with Brian Ashton as his coach and alongside Jason Robinson, so that has got to help."

England then fly to Las Vegas for the USA Sevens on 12-13 February, where they play Argentina, France and Guyana.

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